“Mabel’s not crazy. She’s just…unusual”

These words come on behalf of Nick Longhetti (Peter Falk) after one of his co-workers provokes him on a very sensitive subject. Mabel, of course, refers to Nick’s wife (Gena Rowlands), a housewife who does her very best to provide for her hard-working husband and three children, despite the fact that she is mentally unstable, and struggles with some psychological disorder that no one seems to be able to comprehend. Her mental state only starts to deteriorate even more, which causes everyone around her – her family, her friends and even strangers – to fall victim to her erratic behaviour. Nick suffers the most – how can he love Mabel when she is so often distant? Mabel has her own struggles – she is in a world where she clearly does not belong, and is very often her own worst enemy. A stranger to others and to herself, Mabel tries her best to exist in an environment of people who try and help but just fail to understand her, and unfortunately she continues to spiral out of control, which only serves to impact her family even more. The threat of the psychiatric ward is ever looming, and Mabel continues to try and find a place in a hostile world that just refuses to acknowledge that not everyone has it all together and that some people just need to be protected from the harsh realities of life a little more than others.

John Cassavetes has come to be synonymous with so much – he made complex psychodramas that endeavoured to take unflinching glimpses into the human condition, as well as helping establish the formative roots of independent cinema. A Woman Under the Influence is by all means his masterpiece – not only is is a film that proved the director had a very particular set of talents, but also his tenacious ability to build a film out of nothing. Released without a major distributor, and mainly financed by Cassavetes and his close friends and family, A Woman Under the Influence is a marvel. A complex character portrait, and a heartwrenching saga about numerous different issues – family, mental health and individuality being the primary concerns that persist throughout the film – Cassavetes developed a film that is ferociously brilliant in its approach to taking an unwavering glimpse at the human condition, finding the tough and unsettling facts that underpin everyday life, and presenting it to us in a way that is inherently contradictory: uncomfortable yet mesmerizing, harrowing yet deeply beautiful. It is a film that draws the audience in and captivates us, holding us close as we venture along this haunting tale of suffering that is so elegant, yet deliberately imperfect. Life is such a difficult concept to represent so completely, yet through the empathetic eyes of John Cassavetes, it has never looked this beautiful.

Gena Rowlands may just be the greatest actress of her generation. Never before has there been an actress who has been so able to command the screen like her, especially with the restraint and subtletly she demonstrated consistently throughout her career. Her numerous collaborations with Cassavetes remain amongst the finest director-performer pairings in film history, especially because through their personal and professional partnership, they developed an artistic symbiosis, where Cassavetes wrote the roles that he knew his wife was able to play, and she, in turn, took these characters and developed them into the complex beings we see before us. It is not surprising that her work in A Woman Under the Influence is widely considered one of the finest screen performances in film history – it is definitely difficult to argue with such a sentiment after witnessing the merciless intensity with which she defines the character and all of her nuances and flaws. This is a precise performance, one that does not dare skirt around the issues at the core of the story – Rowlands cuts straight to the point, never wasting a single moment in how she portrays the character. Mabel Longhetti is a compelling character because she is an unlikable one – angry, volatile and unstable, she is not someone made to be loved – neither by characters in the film, nor the audience who watch with great admiration as Rowlands plays the character with a savage honesty that is rarely ever depicted in film. It is a brutal performance, one that is psychologically taxing to experience, and one that is unquestionably beautiful, intricate and truthful. Perhaps hyperbolic, but Rowland’s depiction of Mabel could very well be the definitive performance of the 1970s, and undeniably one of the greatest acting achievements of all time.

Whenever Rowlands is on screen, we just cannot divert our attention. The way she holds the attention of even the most cynical viewer is unprecedented – through her astonishing expressivity, and her unique approach to interpreting this character as a bundle of complexities and neuroses, she finds humanity in an individual who doesn’t only crave love, but desperately needs it. The validation of others is the key to her survival – yet, she is too complex of a woman to ever fully understand the scope of her condition. The burden then falls on those around her, and A Woman Under the Influence is populated by an arrangement of astonishing actors who define the term “supporting” in more ways that one. Peter Falk takes on a c0-lead role as Mabel’s long-suffering husband. There is a strange dynamic to their relationship, even when putting aside the central storyline. Mabel comes from a WASP background, with her parents being dangerously polite and almost too afraid of confrontation – this creates tension in her marriage to Nick, who comes from blue-collar, working-class Italian-American stock, where everything is supposed to be simple. Some have argued that Mabel’s condition is not only inborn, but a product of her surroundings and its interesting to note how the character’s parents (with Martha being played with astonishing sincerity by Rowland’s own mother) seem to display the same kind of middle-class emotional suppression that eventually leads to Mabel’s decline. She can’t be an ordinary housewife, despite being told that is what she’s supposed to be. She has to go in search of some deeper meaning – yet, she has never known anything else. The moments of her rebellion, whether positive (such as waiting in a crowded street for her children to return from school) or negative (a suicide attempt), her actions are not only the result of her fragile mental state, but also a response to those around her, not necessarily a cry for help, but a distressing signal that she is still in there somewhere, she just needs the time and love that others just take for granted.

A Woman Under the Influence is a film about so many different ideas. Just looking at the title, Cassavetes alludes to something quite fascinating, a proverbial force known as “the influence” – he never quite clarifies what he means by it, and presumably this was intentional. Mabel is under the influence of various elements. On the purely carnal side, she is shown to be a bit of a lush, getting drunk from time to time, not for pleasure, but as a necessary distraction. One of the film’s first truly haunting moments comes towards the beginning of the film, where (after Nick has confirmed that their planned date night will have to wait as a result of a work emergency), Mabel dresses up, one of the only instances of her doing so in the film, and tumbles to a local bar, where she becomes overly familiar with a stranger, coercing him to buy her drinks. This is not a case of mere adultery, but rather a plea for attention – if Nick is not going to give her the love she deserves, then she is going to seek it elsewhere. She’s also under the influence of her upbringing – her transition from a middle-class Protestant background to a working-class lifestyle meant she may lead a relatively simple life, but one where her personal issues aren’t given any attention. Being the mother of three children and a loving wife means there is very little time for your own personal issues, and even in a time when mental illness was still relatively taboo and not spoken about widely enough, it becomes far too easy to neglect your own problems that don’t have physical manifestations for the things that apparently matter. Then there is the influence of the world around her – no one seems to understand Mabel. Everyone just sees her as anything from crazy to “unusual” to just dysfunctional – people appear to want to help, but do they truly and sincerely mean it? Mabel exists in a world that just doesn’t understand her plight, and it becomes distressing to see her face all the unnecessary hardships, being the victim of empty sympathy and vitriolic judgement, when all she needs is just unconditional love.

Beneath everything, A Woman Under the Influence is a film that remains relatively simple, featuring the same gritty realism that defined Cassavetes’ career and helped inspire entire generations of independent filmmakers to make movies that don’t need some enormous grand narrative, nor enormous budgets in order to be memorable. The simplicity of his work has always been Cassavetes’ defining quality, as it allows him the chance to focus solely on character and the story, rather than the peripheral elements that he is clearly not all that interested in portraying. In A Woman Under the Influence, he gets to the point almost immediately, launching us directly into the trials and tribulations of this married couple and their struggles to remain afloat in a world that is just waiting to take advantage of them, particularly Mabel, whose plight is the folly for the world’s sometimes myopic injustices, where people like her are easy prey. One of the director’s best narrative qualities was his ability to build tension but never necessarily resolve it – from the very first moment of A Woman Under the Influence, we are on edge, and everything is teetering very close to a complete breakdown. Every moment feels only a stone’s throw away from complete social chaos – yet, just when we think the tension is reaching its apex and is at its breaking point, Cassavetes reigns it in, deflating the tension, but not enough that it brings any long-lasting relief, as it is followed by another moment of unbearable suspense. The reason for doing this is two-fold: constantly teasing Mabel’s breakdown results in the actual occurrence being far more disturbing and unsettling, and creates an indelible impression in the mind of the viewer, who has been patiently waiting for this moment, only to have it presented to us in a way that is truly distressing. The second reason and the one that I’d argue is far more effective, is that the constant tension builds up to the final moments of this film, which are the complete antithesis of the previous two and a half hours. After having being put through the most unsettling of experiences, Cassavetes chooses to end his film in a positive way, as Mabel and Nick profess their love for each other and prepare for bed. It is a beautiful and poetic ending to a harrowing film and serves to show that even in the midst of tragedy, there is still a happy ending to be found.

Each time I watch a Cassavetes film, a new layer of the director’s brilliance as a storyteller is revealed. A gifted filmmaker who had a firm command of both the story and the aesthetic, his work was gritty and uncompromisingly bleak, but also absolutely beautiful. A Woman Under the Influence is his masterpiece – it sees all of his finest qualities converging into an unabashedly unapologetic portrait of a complex woman and the various people in her life that she influences, whether positively or negatively. Gena Rowlands gives one of the most powerful screen performances of all time as Mabel, taking the character to some hopelessly dark and disconcerting places that could not have been easy (the psychological toll this took on the actress is well-documented, and is very evident in the film), but was for the greater cause of finding the idiosyncrasies of a woman who is trying to survive in a world that is perpetually against her. A Woman Under the Influence is a film that the viewer just can’t forget – so many images from it are etched onto your mind, the sheer impact of this film’s message and approach to representing the human condition provokes a lot of profoundly difficult emotions, many of which are just as difficult to understand as Mabel. It is a beautiful film, pure cinematic poetry hailing from the mind of one of the great storytellers of his generation, distilling the entire human experience into a film that feels both epic and intimate, inspirational and heartbreaking, and one that offers a glimmer of hope in a world that just doesn’t always make sense.